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Hello!
Ordinarily; I'd be just about the last person ever to post anything on the 'spiritual' section; but I just had the most amazing aikido-related dream and want to write it down while it's still fresh in my mind.
Usually; I'm not one to remember dreams; most are pretty average I guess; the thing that made this one stand out was its complete clarity; and its solidness, for lack of a better term - most dreams, at least mine, shift around from topic to topic like a drunk discussing politics. This one was solid; it stayed the same throughout its length.
Anyway: I'd just stepped out (in the dream) onto my front lawn for a little practice in the early morning. The air was chill and refreshing; the time; about 6 in the morning, just as the city is beginning to wake up. I was dressed in my normal aikido outfit; gi with blue belt; and began doing forward rolls on the grass which was wet with dew. (The dream was that detailed.) The rolls came easy; far easier than they do in real-life. So; I decided to extend them - starting with a faster walk; then a run - I drifted through the rolls effortlessly.
Then comes the 'dream effect' I guess you'd call it: I started the rolls with a little hop; and noticed I was coming back down at the same speed I went up - jump fast; come down fast. Jump slow; come down slow. I wound up doing rolls with leaping arcs 10 feet high. It was sort of like what happens scuba-diving; if you push off fast; the drag of the water will stop you dead; but if you push off slowly and smoothly; you can glide for meters over the reef. That's how it was going in the dream. I started testing the limits of this new-found freedom; jumping across the lawn; then across the street; then down the street. It was sort of a 'crouching tiger hidden dragon' thing; gliding from ground to rooftop; to treetop, to a swan-dive and roll-out on the pavement. I realized what town I was in; Welland, Ontario, where I spent my childhood. (Which in itself is odd; my childhood was not a happy one; if there's one place I didn't feel like going back to; it was there.)
Throughout; the dream remained crystal-clear and solid; like I was actually there; I remained totally lucid, thinking with seemingly perfect clarity. I was amazed at my newfound power; I wondered at it but chose not to question it - I was certain that if I did so; it would go away. I drifted by the Safeway store I used to hide behind as a kid; over the train tracks, I could count the cars in the parking lot, (six; including a blue taxi waiting for a fare,) see the signs in the windows, (special on chicken legs, $1.99 a pound) everything as if it were real. I drifted by a woman walking her dog; walked along the top of the white picket fence that surrounds a b&b, through (and up, around and over) Woodlawn Cemetary; all places I haven't seen in twenty-two years. The places were not the same as they were when I was a kid; they had changed as time will change things. The big house beside the cemetary, for instance, used to be blue with a wide rolling lawn and an immense beech tree. In the dream; it was white with hedges all around, the climbing wisteria that had dominated the house was gone; cut back to a smaller shrub. I made a big circut of the city; over rooftops and up and around walls; sometimes just jogging and hopping over the odd telephone wires. I came to rest back on my front lawn; made a last big leap into the sky, and woke up.
I woke up completely awake, refreshed and alert. It's the best sleep I've had in years. I bounced out of bed; walked out to my front room to open the windows. It's the same kind of morning: chill, dewey, alive. Most of my front room is a mini-dojo with mats over the floor, a weapons rack on the side and a small kamiza beside the TV. Just to keep the feeling from the dream going; as I was passing back over the mats I did a casual one-handed cartwheel before heading for the orange juice.
I had the fridge open before I realized what just happened; it had seemed so natural.
As God is my witness; I've never done a cartwheel before - a regular 2-handed one, let alone a one-handed one. I just don't have that kind of agility or, since the accident that left me permanently stiff from the waist down, the flexibility.
But I just did one less than an hour ago.
I guess I was still in that half-asleep awareness you get after a real good sleep even though I felt completely awake; because I just tried it again, damn near ripped my arm out of its socket and wound up face-first in the philodendron. Lol - rats; I guess it was only a dream after all.
Even still; something amazing happened and I wanted to tell you about it. I don't really know if it actually has anything to do with aikido; except for the fact that I was practicing it in the dream; its probably just a variant of the 'flying dream' everyone seems to have. But still; it felt absolutely real. I've never been one to think that dreams contain messages; but I'm going to think on this one a bit; it seems important somehow that I do.

Thanks for sharing your story! I enjoyed it very much. I'll spare you any rookie interpretation of your dream but I will say congratulations on it and I'm glad you enjoyed it and embraced it enough to share!

I often, well at least one every few months or so.Once i dreamed that i was just chilling on my porch, wich is about 1.5 metres from the ground.Then suddenly this guy from school came running up the stairs.He had this weird look in his face, dangerous like a criminal or something.I thought he came to rob us.So he attacked me with a sluggish overhead punch (shomenuchi??), and I countered him with an iriminage.He flew away landing on his neck in the grass..DEAD!!

I felt so anxious to get away, not knowing what to do!!This gave me a sort of simulation about how it is to hurt or kill someone, I believe its a disgusting feelin, even if its out of self-defense

Dave, I must say that that is one cool story. The dream itself is cool, but I think what happened when you woke up is the real meat of the story. I think that once in a while people can experience something like what or who they are without their self-imposed limitations. That's what this sounds like to me. It's not that your body can't do a cartwheel, but you know that you can't do a cartwheel. It's not true, clearly, but you make it so. I don't mean this personally, but everyone is like this. One of the guys in our Dojo once said about his little newborn boy, to paraphrase; "he doesn't know that he isn't strong enough to lift something, so that makes him very very strong." I think that is a fundamental truth that is easy to forget, and having remembered is almost impossible to reach that point again. We think we know our limits, and for many reasons our mind won't let us push them too far. Under shock and an adrenaline rush we can do amazing things, but that means that our bodies have the potential to do those things all the time. Sure there may be chemicals and such involved, but it's there just under the surface. It's a great things that you experienced a moment of real freedom there, and I think you should really look into it and see what you can learn from it. Let us know what you think about it in a week or so!

Thanks all; it seems the dream has had one positive physical effect: my ukemi's improved in the last week. I always kinda figured I was fairly relaxed when rolling; actually now that I look at it I was fairly tense in the shoulders and back - the old 'protect the knees' thing. I've been doing a LOT of ukemi in the past week; and I've found I have less nervousness about hitting the mat; which seems to have bred better positional awareness (knowing where I am through the roll). End result: Last week; I was mainly concerning myself with developing 'perfect' rolls; i.e. proper body position, arms, legs in the right spot, etc. Now; I'm just sort of relaxing into it; just letting myself collapse in the direction my body's already going. Seems to work; my rolls are a lot less square; my stability is improved as well. Dunno if this is a result of the dream or the practice it inspired; but whatever it is; I like it.